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U.S. recession fears are in the air following President Donald Trump's tariff plan, with prediction platforms Polymarket and Kalshi indicating heightened concerns the economy will take a hit.On Polymarket, a decentralized prediction platform, the chance of the country slipping into recession this year topped 50% for the first time since the betting contract "US Recession in 2025" began trading early this year. The contract's Yes shares soared to over 50 cents from 39 cents in less than 24 hours. The contract will resolve to Yes if the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) confirms a recession at any point before Dec. 31. The other condition requires back-to-back quarterly contractions in gross domestic product.Kalshi, a U.S.-based regulated prediction market, also points to heightened economic concerns among traders, with the probability of a 2025 recession rising to 54% from 40% .Financial markets tend to be forward-looking and may react to rising U.S. recession odds by sending risk assets such as bitcoin (BTC) and other cryptocurrencies lower. At publication time, the S&P 500 futures traded 3% lower, pointing to severe risk aversion on Wall Street and offering bearish cues to bitcoin, which changed hands at $83,100, 1.5% lower in 24 hours.The sweeping tariffs unveiled Wednesday set a base rate of 10% on all imports, plus higher taxes on 60 nations identified as worst offenders. China, the most heavily hit, warranted a 34% levy on top of the existing 20% charge, taking the total to 54%. The base tariffs go into effect on April 5 and the higher reciprocal rates on April 9.While the Trump administration expects tariffs to rectify the large and persistent U.S. goods trade deficits, in the short run, they could add to domestic inflation and global instability. The latter could happen immediately if China, the European Union and others hit back with higher tariffs, starting a full-blown global trade war.Risk-off to be short-lived?Still, some observers say the tariff uncertainty might lead only to an economic slowdown rather than a full-blown recession."The threat of further tariff escalation remains a key concern, but our economic forecasts do not call for a recession in the US," UBS said in a blog post. "In our base case, a wide range of selective tariffs and counteractions are likely to lead to slower economic growth compared to last year, but they should not prevent the US economy from expanding by around 2%—its historical trend rate—this year." As for financial markets, some observers say the tariffs are dovish, meaning the initial risk-off reaction could be short-lived and quickly reversed by expectations of Federal Reserve interest-rate cuts."Remember - tariffs are dovish, and big tariffs are very dovish," Joseph Wang, operator of the research portal fedguy.com said on X, referring to his November post that detailed how big tariffs would lead to more rate cuts.Wang argued that while tariffs are inflationary, they can be mitigated through foreign-exchange rates and are ultimately transitory. Meanwhile, damage to the business sentiment can be long-lasting, leading to unemployment, which the Fed would want to avoid.Rates traders are already pricing a higher probability that the Fed will cut the benchmark borrowing cost in June, restarting the so-called easing cycle that began in September last year. ... Read more

Over $100 million in Ripple USD (RLUSD) has been issued since April 1, among the highest levels in recent months, as demand for the relatively new stablecoin heats up.A $50 million tranche of RLUSD was issued earlier this week on Tuesday, with another $50 million late Wednesday. That came as Ripple added the stablecoin to its official payments product, with payment providers BKK Forex and iSend already said to be using the stablecoin.Industry leaders expect RLUSD to further shift crypto market dynamics, where upstarts tether (USDT) and USD Coin (USDC) could see competition from Ripple’s product.XRP Ledger-based decentralized financial (DeFi) applications could be a cohort to watch for as RLUSD gains traction on various platforms, boosting XRP token demand.RLUSD is a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, offered on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum blockchain. It is fully backed by U.S. dollar deposits, short-term U.S. Treasuries, and cash equivalents.To maintain its peg, RLUSD relies on a 1:1 reserve system—each token matches an equivalent fiat value.Users can mint RLUSD by depositing dollars with authorized partners, who issue tokens, or burn RLUSD to redeem cash. Market arbitrage helps stabilize its price: if RLUSD trades below $1, traders buy it to redeem at par, raising demand; if above $1, they mint more, increasing supply.Security features make RLUSD appealing to institutional users. An XRP Ledger amendment in January saw a “clawback” feature go live on the network, allowing the issuer to reclaim or "claw back" certain tokens, such as RLUSD, from users' wallets under specific conditions.This feature is typically implemented for regulatory compliance, to recover assets in cases of fraud, illegal activities, or when tokens are sent to unintended addresses.... Read more

Higher-than-usual market volatility affected bulls and bears alike as crypto futures racked up $450 million in liquidations in the past 24 hours as U.S. tariffs went into play.President Donald Trump officially levied a 25% tariff on auto imports and a minimum 10% tariff on all exporters to the U.S. Additional duties were imposed on the nation’s biggest trading partners in Asia and the European Union, with China facing a 50% hike on several goods and a 26% fee on some Indian goods.Turmoil in markets ensued with gains from the past three days wiped out in U.S. indices and cryptocurrencies. Asian markets tumbled early Thursday and U.S. 10-year Treasury yields slumped to the lowest level in more than five months. Gold set yet another record high.Bitcoin inched above $87,000 as investors hoped for leaner long-term effects of the economic changes, with signs of a risk-on environment emerging at the start of the week. Majors ether (ETH) and xrp (XRP) traded above $1,900 and $2.15, respectively, with technical analysis suggesting higher moves in the near term.But the euphoria was short-lived as crypto majors dipped as much as 5% from Wednesday’s highs before gradually stabilizing. In Asian morning hours on Thursday, bitcoin traded just above $83,500 while ether traded slightly over $1,800 — effectively reversing all gains from Tuesday after a sudden drop following the Tokyo open.That caused over $230 million in liquidations on both bullish and bearish bets, data shows, in an unusual move. BTC-tracked futures registered over $172 million in long and short liquidations alone, followed by ETH futures at $120 million and smaller altcoins at $50 million.Liquidation refers to when an exchange forcefully closes a trader’s leveraged position due to a partial or total loss of the trader’s initial margin. It happens when a trader is unable to meet the margin requirements for a leveraged position (fails to have sufficient funds to keep the trade open).Single-sided large liquidations can signal the local top or bottom of a steep price move, which may allow traders to position themselves accordingly. However, Thursday’s liquidations can be considered a sign of market uncertainty.... Read more

Tariffs-led risk-off has payments-focused cryptocurrency XRP trading close to the support zone near $2, a crucial level for confirming a significant topping pattern and renewed downtrend.We are referring to the head-and-shoulders pattern, comprising three peaks, with the middle being the highest. A horizontal line drawn from the base of the three peaks, the neckline, marks the key demand zone.In XRP's case, the $1.90-$2 range has been that demand zone since January. So, a price move below the same would trigger the H&S breakdown, confirming a bullish-to-bearish trend change.A potential breakdown could see prices nearly halve to $1.07, according to veteran analyst and trader Peter Brandt. Chart analysts identify targets using the measure move method, which involves determining the distance from the top of the head to the neckline and subtracting that distance from the breakdown point, in this case, $2.On the higher side, $3, or the lower high created in early March, is the level to beat for the bulls.... Read more

It's a risk-off day in Asia as traders look to Beijing's response to U.S. President Donald Trump's sweeping reciprocal tariffs on China and other Asian nations.On Wednesday, Trump announced reciprocal tariffs on imports from 180 nations, including higher taxes on trading partners identified as worst offenders, such as China and the European Union.Trump imposed a new 34% tariff on goods from China in addition to the existing 20% tax, bringing the total levy to 54%, the highest for any nation. Meanwhile, the latest action did not affect Canada and Mexico.Observers say the ball is now in China's court, and the nature of its retaliation could determine the market reaction."Everything now depends on China. If China devalues the Yuan in response to today's large, additional US tariffs, that sets off a global risk-off that hits EMs first and then - if it persists - spills back to the US. China has so far kept a very low profile. That may now end," Robin Brooks, managing director and chief economist at the International Institute of Finance, said on X.Early Thursday, Beijing urged the U.S. to lift tariffs while vowing retaliation immediately. Meanwhile, the Chinese yuan dropped to a seven-week low of 7 RMB/USD alongside losses in the Asian equities and an impending death cross on bitcoin (BTC).Letting the yuan depreciate, which makes Chinese goods more attractive in international markets, is one way to counter Trump's tariffs. That said, it could spell trouble for carry (currency) trades and scare financial markets, as observed in 2015 and 2018.Besides, potential intervention by the People's Bank of China (PBoC) to stall a rapid yuan decline can boost the dollar index, inadvertently weighing over risk assets, including stocks and cryptocurrencies.It's no coincidence that Asian equities traded in the red at press time, with Japan's Nikkei hitting an eight-month low. The U.S. stock futures fell over 2%, pointing to risk-off mode.Bitcoin (BTC), the leading cryptocurrency by market value, traded near $83,300, having dropped from $88,000 to $82,500 following Trump's tariffs announcement, according to CoinDesk market data. The 50-day simple moving average (SMA) of the cryptocurrency's spot price appears on track to cross below its 200-day SMA, confirming what is known as the "death cross" bearish technical pattern.Though it has a mixed record of predicting price trends, the latest cross happening against the backdrop of escalating trade tensions warrants attention – more so, as options pricing now shows bias for puts or downside protection out to the June end expiry, according to Deribit and Amberdata.... Read more

U.S. stablecoin legislation took another major step on Wednesday as a House of Representatives committee joined Senate counterparts in advancing a bill to be considered by the overall House, bringing stablecoin regulations closer to reality.Eventual approvals in both the overall House and Senate would let lawmakers start melding the two versions into a unified piece of legislation that could get a final nod. Republican lawmakers and President Donald Trump have aimed toward an August goal in getting the effort completed.Though the crypto industry and their most reliable Republican allies in Congress were happy to welcome many Democrats to the yes side on moving the Stablecoin Transparency and Accountability for a Better Ledger Economy (STABLE Act) out of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday, the Democrats on the panel consistently raised concerns about Trump's connections to the industry and stablecoins. Still, five Democrats joined 27 Republicans on the committee to advance the bill after a marathon markup session. A week before the House committee focused on the bill in Wednesday's markup — a session in which lawmakers make changes and debate amendments on legislation — the Trump-tied World Liberty Financial (WLFI) announced it's supporting its own stablecoin (USD1). Trump has been highly active in crypto, including in selling non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and memecoin $TRUMP, even as he pushes for crypto-friendly policies at the federal level.U.S. regulation of stablecoins — generally dollar-tied tokens, such as Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC — is one of the two top policy priorities for the industry. And committee Chairman French Hill argued on the industry's behalf that "innovation needs guardrails, not roadblocks."Republican members declined to discuss President Trump's industry involvement in any explicit terms. When Waters and other Democrats pushed amendments to block the potential conflicts raised by the president's business interests and his direct authority over regulators who would make decisions about stablecoins, they were rejected by the panel's Republicans, who repeatedly called such protections "unnecessary.""We don't discriminate on entrepreneurs based on who they are and where they come from," Hill said. If the government wants clear guardrails around this space, he repeatedly argued, the best move is to pass the bill that establishes oversight. Representative Maxine Waters, the senior Democrat on the panel, said that Trump "leveraged the power of the presidency to establish multiple crypto schemes to enrich himself and his family," calling it a "display of greed.""He's unlike any other issuer, because he's the president of the United States," said Representative Stephen Lynch, the ranking Democrat on the panel's digital assets subcommittee, who argued Trump would be in a position to sign off on any government help needed by his own business interests were they to fail. "If this was a Democratic president who was trying to do this, the Republicans' hair would be on fire, and rightly so. This should not be happening."Another Democrat, Illinois Representative Sean Castin, argued that Tron's Justin Sun has put tens of millions of dollars into WLFI for no clear return other than its relationship to the Trump family. He contended that government officials tied to stablecoins could be influenced by foreign investors in a way that's hidden from public scrutiny. The Democratic arguments failed to move the committee's Republican majority, so no new amendments stuck to the effort. Supporters have said this House version is largely parallel to the Senate's. Representative Bill Huizenga, a Michigan Republican, said the House version properly maintains sufficient authority in the hands of state regulators, which offers a "lighter touch, at times.""We have an administration that is ready to embrace these products, and the time is now," Huizenga said.This was one of a few bills before the House Financial Services Committee dealing with crypto-tied topics. Another piece of legislation debated on Wednesday was one that would form a cross-government group of law-enforcement agencies to address illicit crypto use and another that would ban U.S.-issued central bank digital currency (CBDC). Lawmakers also voted on dozens of amendments to the stablecoin bill before voting to advance the bill itself, prompting Rep. Lynch to joke that the panel may have set a record for the most failed votes in a row. The cross-government bill, the Financial Technology Protection Act, passed with unanimous support, 49-0. The anti-CBDC bill passed with 27 votes, with 22 lawmakers voting against. Though lawmakers initially had issues with their electronic voting system, they began making good time after starting votes near 10:30 p.m. ET – nearly 12.5 hours after the markup began. Voting on all five bills wrapped up by 11:15 p.m. ET. As the stablecoin bill continues to move forward, Trump is also poised to sign the first pro-crypto congressional action: a resolution that erases an Internal Revenue Service rule that targeted decentralized finance (DeFi) operations. The president is expected to sign the resolution, though he hasn't announced a schedule to do so.UPDATE (March 3, 2025, 01:15 UTC): Adds vote totals. ... Read more

Crypto exchange Kraken has registered as a restricted dealer in Canada, allowing the exchange to continue offering crypto trading services to Canadian users under the country’s evolving regulatory framework.The registration, announced on Tuesday, comes after a multi-year process that required exchanges to meet higher standards for investor protection and governance. Kraken said it worked closely with Canadian regulators during this pre-registration phase, upgrading its compliance systems and internal controls to meet expectations set by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC).To lead its Canadian expansion, Kraken named Cynthia Del Pozo as general manager for North America. Del Pozo, a fintech and operations veteran, will oversee strategy, regulatory engagement and business development across the region.“Canada is at a turning point for crypto adoption,” said Del Pozo in a statement, pointing to growing interest from both retail and institutional investors. A recent survey cited by Kraken found that 30% of Canadian investors currently hold crypto assets.Kraken also announced it will offer free Interac e-Transfer deposits for Canadian users, a move aimed at reducing friction for newcomers to the platform. The exchange claims it doubled its team and user base in Canada over the last two years and now manages over $2 billion CAD in client assets.Mayur Gupta, Kraken’s chief marketing officer and general manager of growth, will be speaking at CoinDesk's Consensus 2025 in Toronto on May 14-15.Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.... Read more

Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk's weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I'm Ben Schiller.In this issue:Vana launches token standardHashgraph to debut private blockchainASICs will look more like serversAn interview with Gensyn’s Ben FieldingThis article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.Network NewsVANA’S DATA-BACKED TOKEN STANDARD: Crypto enthusiasts might have heard of the ERC-20 token standard, which provides guidelines to ensure that tokens created on the Ethereum smart contract blockchain are compatible and can interact with other tokens and applications within the network. A similar standard for data-backed tokens, called VRC-20, has now emerged. Vana, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain that helps users monetize personal data by bundling it into DataDAOs for AI model training, introduced the new standard early this week to boost trust and transparency in the market for data-backed digital assets. The VRC-20 standard design includes specific criteria such as fixed supply, governance, and liquidity rules while ensuring real data access by tying tokens to actual data utility. Additionally, it promotes continuous liquidity through rewards that ensure market stability. "This isn’t speculation. This is real financialization of data," Vana noted on X. Vana launched its mainnet in December, with VANA as its native cryptocurrency. Since then, the network has onboarded over 12 million data points through multiple DataDAOs, reflecting strong demand for user-owned data. DataDAOs or data liquidity pools are decentralized marketplaces that bring data on-chain as transferable digital tokens. DLPs are where data is contributed, tokenized and made ready for use in applications such as AI model training. — Omkar Godbole Read more.HASHGRAPH LINES UP Q3 PRIVATE CHAIN: Hashgraph, the blockchain development firm focusing on the Hedera (HBAR) network, is building a private, permissioned blockchain for enterprises in highly regulated industries with plans to debut in the third quarter of 2025. HashSphere, built with Hedera's technology, aims to bridge private and public distributed ledgers, ensuring compliance with regulations while maintaining interoperability, the company said Monday. Hashgraph is looking to provide services to asset managers, banks and payment providers seeking secure, low-cost cross-border transactions with stablecoins.While public blockchains offer security and transparency, enterprises in industries like finance and payments often face compliance challenges, particularly with know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements. HashSphere addresses this by restricting access to verified participants, enabling firms to develop tokenized assets, AI-powered services and other blockchain-based products while meeting regulatory standards. The network also integrates Hedera’s existing tools, including the Token Service for managing digital assets and the Consensus Service for recording transactions with trusted timestamps. The platform is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing developers to deploy decentralized applications using Solidity and other EVM languages. — Kris Sandor Read more.ASICS TO BE MORE LIKE SERVERS: In the beginning, there were only CPUs, then GPUs, for bitcoin mining. Then came the mighty ASIC in 2013, and with it, the “shoebox” form factor that has become emblematic of the bitcoin mining industry. What comes next? ASIC manufacturers are increasingly betting on a hydro-cooled server rack design to become a substantial portion of bitcoin mining fleets, leaning into the “direct-to-chip” cooling for further efficiency gains. Last September, Bitmain announced its model U3S21EXPH developed in a partnership with Hut 8. Its U3 design means that one unit takes up three spaces in a traditional server rack. MicroBT soon followed with its M63 Hydro series, as did Bitdeer’s Sealminer A2 Hydro unit. Following suit, Auradine released its server rack model, the AH3880, this March. Its U2 design, which occupies two server slots, is a bit smaller, but it packs more hashrate per unit of space at 600 TH/s (or 300 TH/s per slot) versus Bitmain’s 860 TH/s (286.66 TH/s per slot). The benefit of a server rack ASIC lies in standardization. Bitcoin miners are increasingly marching in step with the traditional datacenter industry, and that industry could see 40% adoption of direct liquid-to-chip cooling by 2026, according to data center developer Cyrus One. If miners adopt this design, then theoretically, they can optimize their supply chains by converging on server designs that are becoming best practice in the big-boy data center sector. — Colin Harper, Blockspace Read more.GENSYN CEO BEN FIELDING: Ten years ago, when he was still a young AI researcher beginning his PhD track, Ben Fielding explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned by Google and other Big Tech. Compute constraints would always be an issue, he realized. The solution? Decentralized AI. Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute, but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack. And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold. Fielding talked with Jeff Wilser about AI Swarms, how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators — not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.” — Jeff Wilser Read more.In Other NewsWeb3 lacks a dedicated memory layer, making its current architecture inefficient and difficult to scale. Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) offers a solution by enhancing data propagation and storage efficiency in decentralized systems. Implementing RLNC can address Web3's scalability challenges by optimizing memory and data access without compromising decentralization, says Muriel Médard, co-founder of Optimum. Read her op-ed here.Ripple, an enterprise-focused blockchain service closely tied to the XRP Ledger (XRP), said on Wednesday it has integrated its stablecoin to the company's cross-border payments system to boost adoption for Ripple USD (RLUSD). Select Ripple Payments customers including cross-border payment providers BKK Forex and iSend are already using the stablecoin to improve their treasury operations, the company said. Ripple plans to further expand the token's availability of its token to payments customers. RLUSD reached a $244 million market capitalization, growing 87% over the past month. — Kris Sandor reports.Regulatory and PolicyThe U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped or paused over a dozen ongoing cases (and lost one) since U.S. President Donald Trump retook office just over two months ago and appointed Commissioner Mark Uyeda as acting chair. Here is a rundown of what’s left on the SEC’s enforcement docket. — Nik De reports.CalendarApril 8-10: Paris Blockchain WeekApril 30-May 1: Token 2049, DubaiMay 14-16: Consensus, TorontoMay 20-22: Avalanche Summit, LondonMay 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las VegasJune 30-July 3: EthCC, CannesOct. 1-2: Token2049, Singapore... Read more

In a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he intends to immediately sign an order for "reciprocal tariffs" to be levied against U.S. trading partners."Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years but it’s not going to happen anymore," said Trump, adding that the tariffs will begin at midnight.The first specific tariff announced at the ceremony was a 25% levy on all foreign-made autos.Among country-specific tariffs: China will see a rate of 34%, Vietnam 46%, Taiwan 32% South Korea 25%, European Union 20%, Switzerland 31%.The price of bitcoin (BTC) initially rose in the ceremony's early stages, but began to give ground as the tariffs were detailed. The price has retreated to $86,000, down about 1% from prior to the announcements.U.S. stock index futures are plunging, with the Nasdaq 100 lower by 2.3% and the S&P 500 by 1.7%. Gold, meanwhile, shot higher to a new record high just below $3,200 per ounce.... Read more

The HBAR Foundation has teamed up with the founder of internet subscription site OnlyFans, Tim Stokely, in a bid to acquire Chinese social media app TikTok, according to a new Reuters report.Stokely and the HBAR Foundation submitted a bid last week to the White House through the former’s new family-friendly crowdfunding company, Zoop, Reuters said."Our bid for TikTok isn't just about changing ownership, it's about creating a new paradigm where both creators and their communities benefit directly from the value they generate," Zoop co-founder RJ Phillips told Reuters.The HBAR Foundation is the entity behind Hedera (HBAR), a proof-of-stake smart contract platform that launched in 2018. With a market capitalization of $7.2 billion, HBAR is the 22nd-largest cryptocurrency in existence as of press time. The coin only reacted mildly to the news and is up 1.5% in the last 24 hours.The duo’s bid for TikTok isn’t the only one on the market. Online retailing giant Amazon (AMZN) is also looking to acquire the platform, according to The New York Times.The HBAR Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.... Read more

The Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the world’s largest securities settlement system, is pushing deeper into crypto with introducing a blockchain-based platform for tokenized collateral management.Collateral is a fundamental part of risk management in financial markets, ensuring stability amid market fluctuations. However, traditional systems often suffer from inefficiencies due to fragmented infrastructure and lagging settlements.DTCC said its new platform seeks to address these challenges by tokenizing collateral on blockchain rails, allowing for real-time transfers and automation through smart contracts, according to a Wednesday press release. The platform runs within DTCC’s AppChain ecosystem, which was developed on top of LF Decentralized Trust’s Besu blockchain.Read more: Why Asset Tokenization Is Inevitable"Collateral mobility is the ‘killer app’ for institutional use of blockchain," Dan Doney, chief technology officer of DTCC Digital Assets, said in a statement. "By using smart contracts to automate the full range of collateral operations, we enable complex trade execution across markets in real-time at any time, even in volatile conditions.""This platform is unique in that we’ve created something that’s more open, flexible, dynamic, and comprehensive than any previous digital collateral initiative," said Nadine Chakar, global head of DTCC Digital Assets.The initiative comes as tokenization of traditional financial instruments such as bonds, funds and other traditional investments has become one of the hottest use cases for blockchain technology. Multiple financial heavyweights like BlackRock, CME Group and Fidelity have thrown their hat in the ring pursuing benefits such as operational efficiencies, speedier settlements and increased transparency compared to using traditional financial plumbing.DTCC will showcase the platform’s capabilities at the "The Great Collateral Experiment" event on April 23, where industry participants will test how tokenized assets can be mobilized across markets. The company said it also plans to engage with regulators and industry leaders to establish global standards for tokenized collateral.... Read more

Galaxy Digital UK, the subsidiary of Mike Novogratz-led digital asset financial services firm's application for a license to execute derivatives trading in the U.K. has been approved by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).The firm's Investment Banking arm will also use Galaxy Digital UK’s FCA authorization to provide capital raising and investment banking services, according to a statement on Wednesday. The Galaxy U.K. subsidiary will also support its asset management business with fund distribution activities.Galaxy Digital UK is on the FCA's investment firms register, which is for firms authorized to perform MiFID investment services or activities. Galaxy also joined the FCA's crypto register in 2021.“London is a critical financial hub, and this authorisation allows us to deepen our presence in the U.K., aligning with our mission to bridge traditional finance with the digital asset ecosystem,” Leon Marshall, CEO of Galaxy Europe and Global Head of Sales said.The U.K. has attracted crypto companies like Coinbase, Bitpanda and most recently assigned BlackRock a slot on its crypto register.... Read more

It started with a noisy desk. The desk was a wooden cubicle in a lab at Northumbria University, in northern England, where a young AI researcher began his PhD track. This was in 2015. The researcher was Ben Fielding, who had built a large machine stuffed with early GPUs to develop AI. The machine was so loud it annoyed Fielding’s lab-mates. Fielding crammed the machine beneath the desk, but it was so big he had to awkwardly stick his legs to the side.Fielding had some unorthodox ideas. He explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned. “Google was doing this research as well,” Fielding says now. “And they had thousands [of GPUs] in a data center. The things they were doing weren’t crazy. I knew the methods... I had lots of proposals, but I couldn’t run them.”Ben Fielding, CEO of Gensyn, is a speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.Jeff Wilser is the host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast and will host The AI Summit at Consensus 2025.So a decade ago, it dawned on Fielding: Compute constraints would always be an issue. In 2015, he knew that if compute was a hard constraint in academia, it would absolutely be a hard constraint when AI went mainstream.The solution?Decentralized AI.Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute – and I’ve spoken with Fielding about this for CoinDesk and on panel after panel at conferences – but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack.And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold.In this conversation leading up to the AI Summit, at Consensus in Toronto, Fielding gives a primer on AI Swarms, explains how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators -- not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.”This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Congrats on the testnet launch. What’s the gist of what it is?Ben Fielding: It’s the addition of the first MVP features of blockchain integration with what we've launched so far.What were those original features, pre-blockchain?So we launched RL [Reinforcement Learning] Swarm a few weeks ago, which is reinforcement learning, post-training, as a peer-to-peer network.Here’s the easiest way to think about it. When a pre-trained model goes through reasoning training – like DeepSeek-R1 – it learns to critique its own thinking and recursively improve against the task. It can then improve its own answer.We take that process one step further and say, “It’s great for models to critique their own thinking and recursively improve. What if they can talk to other models and critique each other's thinking?” If you get many models together in a group that can all talk to each other, they can start learning how to send information to the other models… with the overall goal of improving the entire swarm itself.Gotcha, which explains the name “Swarm.”Right. It’s this training method which allows many models to kind of combine, in parallel, to improve the outcome of a final meta-model that you could create from those models. But at the same time, you have every single individual model just improving on its own. So if you were to come along with a model on a MacBook, join a swarm for an hour and then drop back out again, you would have an improved local model based on the knowledge in the swarm, and you would have also improved the other models in the swarm. It’s this collaborative training process that any model can join and any model can do. So that's what RL Swarm is.Okay, so that’s what you released a few weeks ago. Now where does blockchain come in?So the blockchain is us moving forward some of the lower-level primitives into the system.Let’s just pretend that someone doesn’t understand the phrase “lower-level primitives.” What do you mean by that?Yeah, so I mean, very close to the resource itself. So if you think about the software stack, you've got a GPU stack in a data center. You've got drivers on top of the GPU. You've got operating systems, virtual machines. You've got all this stuff going up.So a lower-level primitive is the closest to the bottom foundation in the tech stack. Am I getting that right?Yes, exactly. And the RL Swarm is a demonstration of what's possible, basically. It's just a somewhat hacky demo of doing really interesting large-scale, scalable machine learning. But what Gensyn's been doing for the past four-plus years, realistically, is building infrastructure. And so we're in this period now where the infrastructure is all at that v0.1 sort of beta level. It's all done. It's ready to go. We have to figure out how to show the world what's possible when it's quite a big shift to the way people think of machine learning.It sounds like you guys are doing a lot more than decentralized compute, or even infrastructure?We have three main components that sit underneath our infrastructure. Execution – we have consistent execution libraries. We have our own compiler. We have reproducible libraries for any hardware target.The second piece is communication. So assume you can just run a model on any device in the world that's compatible, can you get them to talk to each other? If everybody opts into the same standard, everybody can communicate like TCP/IP from the internet, basically. So we build those libraries and RL Swarm is an example of that communication.And then, finally, verification.Ah, and I’m guessing this is where blockchain comes in…Imagine a scenario where every device in the world is executing consistently. They could link models together. But can they trust each other? If I connected my MacBook to yours, yes, they could execute the same tasks. Yes, they could send tensors back and forth, but do they know that what they send to the other device is actually happening on the other device or not?In the current world, you and I would probably sign a contract to say, yes, we agree that we'll make sure our devices do the right thing. In the machine world, it needs to happen programmatically. So that's the final piece we build, cryptographic proofs, probabilistic proofs, game theoretic proofs to make that process entirely programmatic.So that's where the blockchain comes in. It gives us all of the benefits of blockchain you can imagine, like persistent identity, payments, consensus, etc. And so what we're doing with the testnet now is taking RL Swarm and the primitives of the other infrastructure and we're adding in the blockchain components and saying, ‘Hey, when you join a swarm now, you have a persistent identity, which exists out there on a decentralized ledger.’In the future you’ll have the ability to make payments, but right now, you have that trust consensus mechanism where we can terminate disputes. So, it's kind of an MVP of the future Gensyn infrastructure, where we’re going to add in components as we go.Give us a tease of what’s coming down the pipeline?When we reach main-net, all of the software and infrastructure is live against blockchain as the source of trust, payments, consensus, etc., identity. This is the first step of that. It's adding identity in and saying when you join a swarm, you can register as the same person. Everyone knows who you are without having to check some centralized server or website somewhere.Now let’s get wild and talk further in the future. What does this look like one year from now, two years from now, five years from now? What’s your North Star?Sure. The ultimate vision is to take all of the resources that sit under machine learning and make them instantaneously programmatically accessible to everyone. Machine learning is heavily constrained by its core resources. This creates this huge moat for centralized AI companies, but it doesn't need to exist. It can be open-sourced if we can build the right software. So our view is Gensyn builds all of the low-level infrastructure to allow that to get as close to open-source as it possibly can. People should have the right to build machine learning technologies. ... Read more

It started with a noisy desk. The desk was a wooden cubicle in a lab at Northumbria University, in northern England, where a young AI researcher began his PhD track. This was in 2015. The researcher was Ben Fielding, who had built a large machine stuffed with early GPUs to develop AI. The machine was so loud it annoyed Fielding’s lab-mates. Fielding crammed the machine beneath the desk, but it was so big he had to awkwardly stick his legs to the side.Fielding had some unorthodox ideas. He explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned. “Google was doing this research as well,” Fielding says now. “And they had thousands [of GPUs] in a data center. The things they were doing weren’t crazy. I knew the methods... I had lots of proposals, but I couldn’t run them.”Ben Fielding, CEO of Gensyn, is a speaker at Consensus 2025 in Toronto.Jeff Wilser is the host of The People’s AI: The Decentralized AI Podcast and will host The AI Summit at Consensus 2025.So a decade ago, it dawned on Fielding: Compute constraints would always be an issue. In 2015, he knew that if compute was a hard constraint in academia, it would absolutely be a hard constraint when AI went mainstream.The solution?Decentralized AI.Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute – and I’ve spoken with Fielding about this for CoinDesk and on panel after panel at conferences – but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack.And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold.In this conversation leading up to the AI Summit, at Consensus in Toronto, Fielding gives a primer on AI Swarms, explains how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators -- not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.”This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.Congrats on the testnet launch. What’s the gist of what it is?Ben Fielding: It’s the addition of the first MVP features of blockchain integration with what we've launched so far.What were those original features, pre-blockchain?So we launched RL [Reinforcement Learning] Swarm a few weeks ago, which is reinforcement learning, post-training, as a peer-to-peer network.Here’s the easiest way to think about it. When a pre-trained model goes through reasoning training – like DeepSeek-R1 – it learns to critique its own thinking and recursively improve against the task. It can then improve its own answer.We take that process one step further and say, “It’s great for models to critique their own thinking and recursively improve. What if they can talk to other models and critique each other's thinking?” If you get many models together in a group that can all talk to each other, they can start learning how to send information to the other models… with the overall goal of improving the entire swarm itself.Gotcha, which explains the name “Swarm.”Right. It’s this training method which allows many models to kind of combine, in parallel, to improve the outcome of a final meta-model that you could create from those models. But at the same time, you have every single individual model just improving on its own. So if you were to come along with a model on a MacBook, join a swarm for an hour and then drop back out again, you would have an improved local model based on the knowledge in the swarm, and you would have also improved the other models in the swarm. It’s this collaborative training process that any model can join and any model can do. So that's what RL Swarm is.Okay, so that’s what you released a few weeks ago. Now where does blockchain come in?So the blockchain is us moving forward some of the lower-level primitives into the system.Let’s just pretend that someone doesn’t understand the phrase “lower-level primitives.” What do you mean by that?Yeah, so I mean, very close to the resource itself. So if you think about the software stack, you've got a GPU stack in a data center. You've got drivers on top of the GPU. You've got operating systems, virtual machines. You've got all this stuff going up.So a lower-level primitive is the closest to the bottom foundation in the tech stack. Am I getting that right?Yes, exactly. And the RL Swarm is a demonstration of what's possible, basically. It's just a somewhat hacky demo of doing really interesting large-scale, scalable machine learning. But what Gensyn's been doing for the past four-plus years, realistically, is building infrastructure. And so we're in this period now where the infrastructure is all at that v0.1 sort of beta level. It's all done. It's ready to go. We have to figure out how to show the world what's possible when it's quite a big shift to the way people think of machine learning.It sounds like you guys are doing a lot more than decentralized compute, or even infrastructure?We have three main components that sit underneath our infrastructure. Execution – we have consistent execution libraries. We have our own compiler. We have reproducible libraries for any hardware target.The second piece is communication. So assume you can just run a model on any device in the world that's compatible, can you get them to talk to each other? If everybody opts into the same standard, everybody can communicate like TCP/IP from the internet, basically. So we build those libraries and RL Swarm is an example of that communication.And then, finally, verification.Ah, and I’m guessing this is where blockchain comes in…Imagine a scenario where every device in the world is executing consistently. They could link models together. But can they trust each other? If I connected my MacBook to yours, yes, they could execute the same tasks. Yes, they could send tensors back and forth, but do they know that what they send to the other device is actually happening on the other device or not?In the current world, you and I would probably sign a contract to say, yes, we agree that we'll make sure our devices do the right thing. In the machine world, it needs to happen programmatically. So that's the final piece we build, cryptographic proofs, probabilistic proofs, game theoretic proofs to make that process entirely programmatic.So that's where the blockchain comes in. It gives us all of the benefits of blockchain you can imagine, like persistent identity, payments, consensus, etc. And so what we're doing with the testnet now is taking RL Swarm and the primitives of the other infrastructure and we're adding in the blockchain components and saying, ‘Hey, when you join a swarm now, you have a persistent identity, which exists out there on a decentralized ledger.’In the future you’ll have the ability to make payments, but right now, you have that trust consensus mechanism where we can terminate disputes. So, it's kind of an MVP of the future Gensyn infrastructure, where we’re going to add in components as we go.Give us a tease of what’s coming down the pipeline?When we reach main-net, all of the software and infrastructure is live against blockchain as the source of trust, payments, consensus, etc., identity. This is the first step of that. It's adding identity in and saying when you join a swarm, you can register as the same person. Everyone knows who you are without having to check some centralized server or website somewhere.Now let’s get wild and talk further in the future. What does this look like one year from now, two years from now, five years from now? What’s your North Star?Sure. The ultimate vision is to take all of the resources that sit under machine learning and make them instantaneously programmatically accessible to everyone. Machine learning is heavily constrained by its core resources. This creates this huge moat for centralized AI companies, but it doesn't need to exist. It can be open-sourced if we can build the right software. So our view is Gensyn builds all of the low-level infrastructure to allow that to get as close to open-source as it possibly can. People should have the right to build machine learning technologies. ... Read more

FDUSD, the stablecoin issued by Hong Kong-based First Digital, has wobbled from its $1 price peg as investor concerns mounted over its reserves, though the company said Wednesday that it was "completely solvent."FDUSD has dropped to 0.87 against Tether's USDT stablecoin and 0.76 against Circle's USDC on Binance, the main exchange where FDUSD is listed. Notably, bitcoin (BTC) also nearly hit 100,000 against FDUSD. The token has stabilized around $0.98-$0.96 later, still trading below its supposed price anchor.The sudden price action happened as CoinDesk earlier Wednesday reported that some of the TrueUSD stablecoin's reserve assets were stuck in illiquid investments, according to filings. Tron founder Justin Sun bailed out the issuer company. First Digital Trust, a trust company affiliated to First Digital, was appointed to manage TUSD reserves. "First Digital Trust (FDT) is effectively insolvent and unable to fulfill client fund redemptions. I strongly recommend that users take immediate action to secure their assets," Tron founder Justin Sun claimed in a Wednesday X post. First Digital refuted the allegations in an X post, saying that "First Digital is completely solvent" and "every dollar backing FDUSD is completely, secure, safe and accounted for with US backed T-Bills.""This is a typical Justin Sun smear campaign to try to attack a competitor to his business. As we told the reporter at CoinDesk, we have not yet had the opportunity to defend ourselves and instead of letting the TUSD matter be dealt with in court, Justin has instead resorted to a coordinated social media effort to try to damage FDUSD as a business competitor," the company said. "FDT will pursue legal action to protect its rights and reputation." FDUSD's latest monthly reserve report showed that the $2 billion of reserve assets were held mostly in U.S. Treasury bills and a lesser part in repo facilities and fixed deposits.UPDATE (Apr. 2, 17:15): Updated FDUSD price action.... Read more